Thomas’s face darkened.
“What’s in the box?” I asked.
He looked past me toward the house I had saved, then toward the family I had just lost.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But Celia wrote one instruction on the bank form.”
My heart hammered.
“What instruction?”
Thomas placed the key in my hand.
“Open it before Brent does.”
PART 3
The Woman in the Blue Coat
The second car that pulled into my parents’ driveway was not a police cruiser, not a repo truck, not anything dramatic enough to match the fear suddenly crawling across my mother’s face.
It was a small navy sedan with salt on the tires and a cracked plastic angel hanging from the rearview mirror.
My mother stared through the front window, her lips parted, one hand still gripping the certified envelope I had sent. My father stood beside her in the hallway, the documents trembling slightly in his fingers. Brent had moved behind them, not out of concern, but because he could smell trouble and wanted to know whether it had his name on it.
